Guidance

This guideline covers a set of principles that can be used to help people change their behaviour. The aim is for practitioners to use these principles to encourage people to adopt a healthier lifestyle by, for example, stopping smoking, adopting a healthy diet and being more physically active.

The recommendations in this guideline on individual level interventions (recommendation 4) and evaluation (recommendation 7) have been built upon further in the NICE guideline on behaviour change: individual approaches (PH49).

Recommendations

This guideline recommends a set of principles to use as the basis for:

Guideline development process

Your responsibility

The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or service users. The application of the recommendations in this guideline is not mandatory and the guideline does not override the responsibility of healthcare professionals to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient, in consultation with the patient and/or their carer or guardian.

Local commissioners and/or providers have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual health professionals and their patients or service users wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with compliance with those duties.